This volume considers Karl Barth’s first major publication, his commentary on the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans in its two editions (1919 and 1922), analyzing both its contents and its ...relevance today. The volume includes essays by specialists of Barth’s thought as well as by prominent contemporary thinkers who, sometimes for the first time, assess Barth’s contribution.
Response to Martin Kavka Elgendy, Rick
Modern theology,
January 2020, 2020-01-00, 20200101, Volume:
36, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Martin Kavka has done a great service for emerging work on negative political theology, not only by rendering an important set of figures – Taubes, but also Benjamin and Jones – partially ...intelligible on its terms, but also by so clearly invoking and arranging some of the themes that this approach will have to coordinate in order to avoid becoming, as Kavka notes, mere negation, of Schmitt or others. This response seeks to appreciate Kavka’s contribution and use it as an occasion to surface some of the concepts required for a compelling negative political theology. We might stipulate, though this is also the question before all the contributions to this special issue, that the engine of negative political theology is, in the broadest terms, transcendence or difference: between God and the world, and therefore between God’s justice and any instance of human justice. Though this transcendence may avoid the bad infinity feared by Hegel by including within itself at the least the possibility of immanent intimacy, it is basically characterized by an impulse toward claims of non-identity that seeks to create space that can be filled, variously, by affirmation and critique. Such non-identity is crucial as a technique of political self-examination, especially when applied to de-naturalize and situate – though not to quiet – the political aspirations we hold most dear. By implication, I take it that at least some of the authors in this special issue worry that a “positive political theology,” one marked by affirmations without a hint of the silence that comes from transcendence, enlists attractive political norms that will quickly become idols. Insofar as political theologies are positive in this way, the road they travel leads to theocracy; their failure is a mercy, in an ironic disservice to the goods they represent.
For more than a century, the teaching authority of the Catholic
Church has attempted to walk along with the modern world,
criticizing what is bad and praising what is good. Counsels of
Imperfection ...described the current state of that fairly bumpy
journey. The book is divided into 11 chapters. First comes an
introduction to ever-changing modernity and the unchanging
Christian understanding of human nature and society. Then come two
chapters on economics, including a careful delineation of the
Catholic response, past and present, to socialism and capitalism.
The next topic is government, with one chapter on Church and State,
another on War, and a third that runs quickly through democracy,
human rights, the welfare state, crimes and punishments (including
the death penalty), anti-Semitism, and migration. Counsels of
Imperfection then dedicates two chapters on ecology, including
an enthusiastic analysis of Francis's "technocratic paradigm". The
last topic is the family teaching, which presents the social
aspects of the Church's sexual teaching. A brief concluding chapter
looks at the teaching's changing response to the modern world, and
at the ambiguous Catholic appreciation of the modern idea of
progress. For each topic, Counsels of Imperfection
provides biblical, historical and a broad philosophical background.
Thomas Aquinas appears often, but so does G. W. F Hegel. The goal
is not only to explain what the Church really says, but also how it
got to its current position and who it is arguing with. In the
spirit of a doctrine that is always in development, Counsels of
Imperfection points out both strong-points and imperfections
in the teaching. The book should be of interest to specialists in
Catholic Social Teaching, but its main audience is curious
newcomers, especially people who do not want to be told that there
are simple Catholic answers to the complicated problems of the
modern world.
Is it right to "just preach the text"?Why do we preach and do theology? How do we relate them? And how do they relate to God's word?Theology Is for Preaching helps preachers with theology and ...theologians with preaching. Though diverse in contexts and disciplines, the contributors share a commitment to equipping the saints to "rightly handle the word of truth." Through essays on foundations, methods, employing theology for preaching, and preaching for theology, this volume will equip preachers and theologians to engage deeply with the text of the Bible and communicate its meaning with clarity.
Offers an account of Christian identity as failure
Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both ...the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church.
The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. The first major reckoning of Zizek's relation to Christian theology.Rose builds upon Zizek's work, while remaining deeply critical at key moments.
Since the late 1970s, theologians have been attempting to integrate mimetic theory into different fields of theology, yet a distrust of mimetic theory persists in some theological camps. In René ...Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology, Grant Kaplan brings mimetic theory into conversation with theology both to elucidate the relevance of mimetic theory for the discipline of fundamental theology and to understand the work of René Girard within a theological framework. Rather than focus on Christology or atonement theory as the locus of interaction between Girard and theology, Kaplan centers his discussion on the apologetic quality of mimetic theory and the impact of mimetic theory on fundamental theology, the subdiscipline that grew to replace apologetics. His book explores the relation between Girard and fundamental theology in several keys. In one, it understands mimetic theory as a heuristic device that allows theological narratives and positions to become more intelligible and, by so doing, makes theology more persuasive. In another key, Kaplan shows how mimetic theory, when placed in dialogue with particular theologians, can advance theological discussion in areas where mimetic theory has seldom been invoked. On this level the book performs a dialogue with theology that both revisits earlier theological efforts and also demonstrates how mimetic theory brings valuable dimensions to questions of fundamental theology.
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